Sunday, January 19, 2014

The Trouble with Christie

I
was there in Tampa in August, 2012, for Governor Chris Christie’s
keynote address at the Republican National Convention, and from the
first line I knew this guy was trouble: “Well! This stage and this
moment are very improbable for me.” For twenty-four overwrought minutes,
Christie spoke, proudly, glowingly, about the subject that really gets
him fired up, which is himself—how he always faces the hard truths; how
he wants to be respected more than loved; how, of his two parents, he’s much more like his tough, brutally honest Sicilian mother (“I am her
son!”) than like his good-hearted, lovable Irish father. It was later
observed that the Governor almost forgot to mention the Party’s
Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, whose nomination Christie was in
Tampa to kick off; less widely remarked was that he also practically
disowned his sole surviving parent, who was in the audience listening,
and presumably didn’t mind.

The trouble with Christie has to do with more
than ordinary narcissism, which, after all, is practically an entry
requirement for a political career. When Barack Obama used to tell
crowds during the 2008 campaign, “This is not about me. It’s about you,”
I always interpreted the words to mean that it actually was
about him. But Obama, whose ego is so securely under control that his
self-sufficiency has become a point of criticism among Washington
pundits, would never devote more than a paragraph to his own personality
(as opposed to his biography)—which was the subject not just of
Christie’s convention keynote speech but of his entire political career.
What struck me in Tampa even more than his self-infatuated lyrics was
the score they were set to—the particular combination of bluster,
self-pity, sentimentality, and inextinguishable hostility wrapped in
appeals to higher things. (After declaring that Democrats “believe the
American people are content to live the lie with them,” Christie waved
the flag of bipartisanship, saying, “We lose when we play along with
their game of scaring and dividing.”) Those are dangerously combustible
elements in a political personality. Americans older than fifty are all
too familiar with them.
The engineered traffic nightmare in Fort Lee, New Jersey, is, of
course, being called Bridgegate. The suffix has been used, overused, and
misused for almost every political scandal since a “third-rate
burglary” at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters on the
night of June 16, 1972. In the case of Bridgegate, there are several key
limiting factors. It’s a state scandal, not a national one. A potential
Presidency might be at stake, but not an actual one. No evidence ties
the Governor directly to the havoc visited on one of New Jersey’s five
hundred and sixty-six municipalities—not yet, anyway. On the scale of
Teapot Dome and Iran-Contra and even Monica, the four-day closing of two
approach lanes to the George Washington Bridge is very minor league.
So why do I keep having flashbacks to 1972? Some of the parallels are
weirdly exact. Whether or not he ordered the Watergate bugging, Richard
Nixon ran a campaign of dirty tricks for two reasons: he wanted to run
up the score going into his second term, and he was a supremely
mean-spirited man. Nixon’s reëlection campaign reached out to as many
Democrats as possible (not just elected officials but rank-and-file
blue-collar workers and Catholics). Nixon ran not as the Republican
Party’s leader but, in the words of his bumper sticker, as just
“President Nixon.” His landslide win over George McGovern translated
into no Republican advantage in congressional races—the Democrats more
than held their own. The Washington Post’s David Broder later called it “an extraordinarily selfish victory.”
Christie’s 2013 reëlection tracks closely with this story: an all-out
effort to court Democrats in order to maximize his personal power, and a
landslide victory in November, with all the benefit going to the
Governor, not to his fellow-Republicans in the state legislature. On
Christmas, the Times published a piece about Christie’s long record of bullying and retribution.
In it, the Fort Lee traffic jam was mentioned as just one of many cases
(and, I have to admit, not the one that stayed with me) of vengefulness
so petty that it inescapably called to mind the American President who
incarnated that quality, and was brought down by it.
In the e-mails that went public last week when the scandal broke, the
tone of Christie’s aides and appointees displays the thuggery and
overweening arrogance that were characteristic of Nixon’s men when the
President was at the height of his popularity—utter contempt for
opponents, not the slightest anxiety about getting caught. In both
cases, whether or not the boss sanctioned these actions, the tone came
from the top. It’s the way officials talk when they feel they have
nothing to fear, when there’s a kind of competition to sound toughest,
because that’s what the boss wants and rewards. Once all hell broke
loose, Christie insisted, in a compelling and self-indulgent press
conference that, like his keynote speech, was all about himself, that he
was the scandal’s biggest victim. “I am not a bully,” he said, in an
echo of one of Nixon’s most famous remarks.
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they
deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them. Warren G. Harding
surrounded himself with corrupt pols and businessmen, then checked out,
leading to the most sensational case of bribery in American history.
Ronald Reagan combined zealotry and fantasy, and Oliver North acted them
out. Bill Clinton was libidinous and truth-parsing but also cautious,
while George W. Bush was an incurious crusader who believed himself
chosen by God and drove almost the entire national-security
establishment into lawlessness without thinking twice. Christie, more
than any of these, is reminiscent of the President whose petty
hatefulness destroyed him—which is why, as NBC’s newscaster said when
signing off on an early report on that long-ago burglary, I don’t think
we’ve heard the last of this.Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty.